One Pose to Connect Them All

When teaching yoga, you can include any poses you like. Be creative. Have fun with it. There’s only one pose you have to include. Remove this pose, and it’s no longer yoga.

Which pose is this? Savasana.

Yoga is a moving meditation. And then we reach perfect stillness in Savasana. Our body is still. And if we’re practicing the pose correctly, our mind is also still.

Some yogis say this is the most important pose. Others say it’s the most difficult pose. The way I see it, it’s both.

Savasana & Meditation

Every time we practice asana, we take this five-minute rest. If we had a good yoga practice, chances are we’ll have an equally good Savasana. A good Savasana sets the conditions for a productive meditation session to follow.

Meditation can take many forms. We can return to a comfortable seated position and focus on our breath. In this seated position, we can also practice vipassana meditation.

Another option is to stay lying down and practice yoga nidra – which literally translates to “yoga sleep.” Like Savasana, this is a conscious sleep state. Our body is resting deeply. Unlike Savasana, we are guided by our teacher through a relaxing body scan. This session can be as short as 10 minutes or as long as an hour.

Through this guided relaxation session, our teacher has us focus on different parts of our body – one by one, from head to toe. We focus on consciously relaxing each body part as deeply as we can.

Even in Savasana, we may still be holding tension in a part of our body. Often, we unconsciously hold tension in places where it’s easy to hide – our neck, shoulders, belly, jaw and forehead. Yoga nidra helps us bring this muscular tension to our conscious awareness, where we can now consciously relax it.

When our body is deeply relaxed, our mind is also able to let go. We sink into a deeper state of relaxation and restoration.

Yoga & Brain Waves

Before our yoga class, our mind is switched on and alert to help us get through the work day. We have a constant stream of thoughts that can help us problem-solve.

We can measure this activity of our brain, which is referred to scientifically as “brain waves.” In this alert and active state of mind, our brain activity is referred to as Beta brain waves, or “busy Beta.” This brain activity moves at a rate of 14-30 cycles a second.

Near the end of the yoga session, we’re physically and mentally relaxed. Our brain activity has slowed down to Alpha waves, about 9-13 cycles a second.

If we have a particularly good Savasana, or if we’re guided through a yoga nidra session, we’re likely to reach the next level of brain activity, Theta. Theta waves move at 4-8 cycles a second.

We experience this brain activity when we’re deeply relaxed. Or while we’re asleep and dreaming. In other words, we can have this experience either when we’re awake or asleep, conscious or unconscious.

Theta brain wave states are particularly helpful for balancing our nervous system. But we can’t get there if our mind is overactive. This is why we focus on our breath in yoga. This is why we emphasize a still mind in Savasana. This gentle focus helps to calm down our mind, and get us into slower brain wave states. This is where the mental benefits of yoga happen.

Intro to Guided Imagery

Yoga nidra helps us reliably shift our brain waves to a deeply relaxed state – right on the border between conscious and unconscious brain activity. From this deeply relaxed state of Yoga nidra, we can go one step further. We can actively engage our unconscious mind through the practice of guided imagery.

Here we define “imagery” as thoughts we can see, feel, taste, hear or smell. And “guided imagery” as a technique where a teacher helps us relax your body and mind so we can focus our imagination in a specific way.

Why is guided imagery important? As Dr. Martin Rossman, author of Guided Imagery for Self-Healing notes: “it is the dominant language of the right brain and the human unconscious.” He points to recent developments in our understanding of imagery, and how “imagery is a natural language of a major part of our nervous system.”

Imagery & Our Nervous System

Our autonomic nervous system is the part of our nervous system that controls our heart rate, blood pressure, breathing, digestion, saliva, etc. This system has two modes: sympathetic (fight or flight) and parasympathetic (rest and digest).

If you try to increase your heart rate by telling your body to turn it up, nothing will happen. It doesn’t work that way. Our autonomic nervous system is automatic, meaning it’s beyond our conscious control.

You may have heard that the only way to consciously change your autonomic nervous system is by changing your breathing.

Short and fast breathing like kapalabhati can switch on our “fight or flight” mode, causing our heart rate and blood pressure to increase. If we practice relaxing breathing – inhale for 4, exhale for 8 – this can engage our “rest and digest” mode, which lowers our heart rate and blood pressure.

Breathing practices are the only way we can consciously take control of our autonomic nervous system. But what about using guided imagery? Is it possible to take control of our nervous system on the unconscious level?

Increased saliva (mouth-watering) is a function of our “rest and digest” nervous system. If someone asks you to increase your saliva, it probably won’t do anything. But Dr. Rossman has a simple exercise to test guided imagery on your nervous system:
Relax for a moment and imagine that you are holding a juicy yellow lemon. Feel its coolness, texture, and weight in your hand. Imagine cutting it in half and squeezing the juice of one half of it into a glass. Perhaps some pulp and a seed or two drop into the glass. Imagine raising the glass to your lips and taking a good mouthful of the sour lemon juice. Swish it around in your mouth, taste its sourness, and swallow. Chances are your mouth is watering now. So what just happened? Our nervous system doesn’t respond to words. It doesn’t respond to logic. It does, on the other hand, respond to images.

Images – The Dialogue Between Our Conscious & Unconscious Mind

Where things get really interesting is that imagery allows for a dialogue. Dr. Rossman explains that “imagery is a two-way medium of communication between your silent, unconscious mind and your verbal, conscious mind.”

Not only can you communicate with your unconscious through images, but it speaks to you the same way. The best example of this is our dreams. In our dreams, our unconscious mind communicates not through logic and reason, but the only way it knows how – through images. Dr. Rossman notes how “Carl Jung, the eminent Swiss psychiatrist, believed that imagery was as close to the unconscious as we can get, that it may even be the unconscious mind directly revealing itself.”

We get these images while we sleep, but guided imagery offers a unique opportunity to receive dream-like images while we’re still awake and conscious.

How Do I Get Started?

Like meditation, guided imagery takes practice. If you practice twice a week, you should see progress over a month. It begins with a Yoga nidra session where you engage a Theta brain state.

Next, you can see where your imagination takes you when you hear the phrase: “imagine yourself going to a place of great beauty and safety and comfort to you.” With practice, this place becomes more vivid.

More advanced guided imagery practice allows for a direct dialogue with your unconscious. This dialogue may take the form of pictures, words, thoughts or sensations. Dr. Rossman refers to this as your “inner advisor” – someone who you ask questions, and who responds through these images.

We often hear that the answers to the questions we’re looking for are already inside us, we just need to be quiet enough to listen. Think of guided imagery as one more tool in a yogi’s kit to help quiet the mind, find the answer and draw it out.

To check out an intro to Dr. Rossman’s guided imagery and transcript, visit RedpointYoga.com/GuidedImagery. This is a great 15 minute extension to Savasana for yogis and yoga teachers.

You can purchase Dr. Rossman’s latest book, The Worry Solution, and his guided imagery mp3s at thehealingmind.org/products/the-worry-solution-book-and-2cd-set.